[dentin]

As part of our global mapping and linearization experiment on Alter Aeon, I've thought a lot about the concept of different room sizes for different types of areas, and ways to have them make sense. Different terrain types or areas may have vastly different sizes, for example wandering the open plains versus inside a small cave.

One of the more common examples of this would be outdoor/wilderness rooms versus town rooms. If you look on a real map, you see small pinpricks of civilization surrounded by vast areas of open space; the size of towns may be one tenth or less the distance between them. For most of the MUDs I'm familiar with, wilderness/linkage rooms clearly covered a lot more distance than town/city rooms did.

The question is, if we designate a small number of room size categories, what approximate sizes and ratios do we pick, and how many different scales? Is a two scale (large and small) system with a factor of ten sufficient? What about three or four different scale sizes? An example of three categories might be less than 25 feet for small buildings and areas; 25-250 feet for larger buildings, caverns, and city/town streets; and 250-5000 feet for outdoor/wilderness and linkage zones.

[Of course the natural response is 'allow room size to be arbitrary and settable', but that answer is boring and doesn't really address the abstract concept of scaling and how builders perceive rooms when they build them. It also makes it difficult to build maps without gaps unless you have very good tools.]

-dentin